


girl genius was pretty accurate as to the mental state of most mad scientists, actually

by Ranbaqueen



Category: World Trigger (Anime & Manga)
Genre: A - Freeform, Ask about my Neighborhood time measurement headcanons!, Because on one hand, Chapter 8 is an AU of an AU, Crack, DIO is a band and also a vampire. Mostly a band tho, Doom Lasers, Eldrich Train Summoning, Gen, He's about as close to a normal human as exists in Tamakoma, Hyuse gets to fulfill two roles!, IKEA is creepy sometimes, Lists, Mild Body Horror but in a funny way, One of the Amatori siblings will be all emo about how they MUST DRINK BLOOD OR THEY SHALL TURN INTO, Pulpy Halloween Monsters AU, SCREAMING PREDATOR OF THE NIGHT, This started out as a Mad Science AU and spiraled from there, and be like "you can just buy this at the grocery store you know", and no one is more competent than in canon, and then osamu will show up, because he has the most relatable viewpoint here, but on the other?, does not mean he won't get beat up if ppl want to start throwing hands, fun game: try rereading world trigger but imagine that chika is a vampire, he's the Alien Invader and also the Normal Human Being here, into a, mild cosmic horror, osamu knowing shit about demonology now, shinoda definitely did not authorize this, so he's the one whose perspective we get to see, sure he's an alien but that's not as weird as being able to SEE THE FUTURE, there's the whole afto thing, which is hard to overlook in any situation involving Hyuse., with this massive thermos of like goat blood, yes chika and her family are all vampires. no this is not plot signifigant yet
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-24
Updated: 2021-02-09
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:00:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 7,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26090773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ranbaqueen/pseuds/Ranbaqueen
Summary: guys what if all of TK2 was some kind of undead execpt Hyuse and I kept saying that like all casually and shit? What then?Edit: Ok, I do not want to have the tags be this long so let's have the rundown of the AU be here, in the summary, where this should probably go.Osamu is a really terrible sorcerer. He's weirdly good at being a source of archaic sometimes-useful trivia, but most of the time he just helps Rinji or Chika or both do their weird vampire shit.Kuga is the resident lich. He's a lich because his "soul" is held in a vessel separate from his body, which gives him powers that he would not otherwise have. He is the emotional core of this group of ridiculous teens (as in canon).We've been over Chika and her vampirism already, but I feel like I should mention that she is sort of a nascent one? Like. She's young and her fangs only came in last year, and she's not so into the murder part.Hyuse is as close to normal as you can be when you're a space alien. In this messy collection of cheesy horror tropes, he fulfills two roles- normal person/viewpoint charecter, and Alien Invader. the reason here is in the tags, because I'm out of space.
Relationships: Hyuse & Chika Amatori & Yuma Kuga & Osamu Mikumo, Osamu Mikumo & Chika Amatori & Rinji Amatori, Tamakoma 2 Prison Break Buddies
Comments: 10
Kudos: 24





	1. If you like death lasers and getting caught in the rain...

To be honest, the only good part about this situation was that they’d found Rinji at last. 

Sure, they were in the neighborhood. And maybe Replica was with them at last, and Hyuse was very close to being home. Those were both good things. However, all of these positives were overwhelmed by the fact that Osamu Mikumo was staring at a death laser.

The prison infiltration had actually gone quite well until five minutes ago. Sure, they’d had to knock out a few (read: almost all) guards, and maybe this was slightly less authorized by Shinoda as was ideal, but aside from those minor hiccups, they were really making a good job of it. All of Hyuse’s “friend’s” (a random guard who he had cornered in a back alley and bought drinks for until they had told him everything) intel had been spot on, and they were approaching the maximum-security seclusion tower where Rinji was supposed to be. 

In retrospect, that should have been a warning sign. Another warning sign was the mad cackling and mysterious flashes coming from the tower. Yet another was the fact that someone had written “ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE” on a sign and put it facing the tower, with a fake skeleton wrapped around the base.

Chika had been silent up until this point. This was fine. Chika was almost always working up to something when she was silent. This was also fine. 

....At least, he hoped that it was fake. Oops, nevermind, that was flesh. Gross. 

Unfortunately, as all of their senses of danger had been worn down over the years, whether by the military, constant neighbor attacks, or just being Like That, they all thought that going into the scary science tower was a great idea (Except for Hyuse, who had an actual sense of danger, but was very good at ignoring it, so he was going in out of sheer stubbornness, because he was a stubborn bubborn). The Scary Science Tower (trademark pending review) was very tall. 

“This is very tall”, said Mikumo, stating the extremely obvious. Hyuse glared at him. It was ineffective, as Hyuse had been glaring at everyone at point blank range for two months and they all had built up a resistance. 

The top of the tower was a very nice room. It had obviously started life as several prison cells, as evidenced by the rubble littering the room from where the walls had been smashed with a sledgehammer. There were leather sofas littered all around, covered in maps and various blueprints. The floor seemed to be carpeted with drawings of eggs, labeled as “THE DRAGON EGG” and “MUST ALTER BROMIDIAL SEQUENCE?” and “ORDER MIKUMO TO MAKE DRAGON SANDWICH”. Osamu really did not want that last one to come to fruition. He made a mental note to destroy all plans related to dragons at his earliest convenience. He had enough weird horned people on his hands right now, thankyouverymuch. 

Then one of the lumps moved. For a split second, Osamu thought it was a dragon. Unfortunately, it was much worse. 

“BEHOLD MY MAGNIFECENT DEATH LASER, MY MINIONS (AND FRIENDS THEREOFE)” bellowed the Dark Lord of Sanity-Destroying Pointless Machines Which You Are Forced to Make And Operate As Per The Tutoring Contract You Neglected to Actually Read Before Signing, or Rinji Amatori as was on his birth certificate, somehow managing to enunciate a parentheses. 

Chika was rummaging around in the papers for something. This was also fine and normal. She was probably looking for that suspicious hard drive that she’d given Rinji when he left. 

“How did you enunciate a parenthesis?” asked Osamu, having gotten used to the bellowing years ago. 

“MILLISECOND PAUSES IN BETWEEN WORDS. NOW HELP ME AIM THIS DEATH LASER AT THE CAPITAL, THEY HAVE INSULTED ME!” said the DLSDPMWYAFMOAPTTCYNARBF (or Rinji Amatori, as was on his Womb Escape Club card), sounding much more excited than anyone who was in possession of a doom laser should be . 

Chika suddenly stood up. She yelled “FOUND IT!” in a voice that implied something awful for all not on her side. Unfortunately, this was a tone of voice that Osamu knew very well. She then proceeded to plug whatever she had found into the doom laser. It started to buzz, in a way remisnent of a swarm of angry bees. 

Kuga and Hyuse had popcorn. Where had they found popcorn?

The death laser was pointed out the window. This was good. Death lasers pointed out the window were much less likely to vaporize you. Unfortunately, they were much more likely to destroy the capital of Aftokrator, which would probably be bad for the exchange rate. He turned to Hyuse. Surely, he would be against this-

Hyuse nodded. “Try to hit Lord Beliston’s house. I’ll point it out for you.”

-Aftokrator was doomed. Oh well.


	2. According to all known laws of aviation, there is no way a bee should be able to fly. Its wings are too small to get its fat little body off the ground. The bee, of course, flies anyway, because bees don't care what humans think is impossible.

Reiji Kizaki stared at the obvious madman in the middle of his living room. Well, technically it was Rindo’s living room, or maybe Kido’s. Shinoda wasn’t out of the running either, as who Yugo Kuga had chosen to leave his worldly posessions to when he left was still a subject of hot-blooded debate. No matter what, though, all three proposed owners of the room would doubtless disapprove of the many, many, _many_ things spread all across the floor, as well as the two people who seemed to be actively dismantling the television and kitchen appliances for parts.

“Chika” Reiji said, already regretting the decision to ask her from the look in her eyes, “Why are you disassembling the TV?”

Chika shrugged. “Because my brother asked me to, and when my brother asks me to do things they always end either well or with explosions. Sometimes both.”

“Osamu?” the Responsible Adult asked, hoping for a dose of either sanity (unlikely, as the dude was doing something mildly hazardous with a coffee machine, some couch springs, and what used to be their dishwasher) or mild irritation at being made to dismantle a dishwasher.

“Yes?” asked Osamu, who looked about as happy with what he was doing to the dishwasher as a Rottweiler is when they find one of those plush squeaky toys.

“What are you doing to the washing machine?”

“Well, right now I’m hooking the coffeepot into the water circulation thingy to serve as an extended brewing system, and soon I’m going to hook the miniature black hole Rinji’s making into the Tide Pod Holder as a power source, and Hatohara is out getting soda but when she’s back we’ll fill your plumbing with it, and soon we shall be perfectly caffeinated forever.” This last bit was delivered with resignation, as if he had seen

“After this, we’ll go take over downtown in a robot!” Chimed in Rinji, who was apparently making a black hole.

“The Neighbors already did that, brother dearest.”

Reiji shot Osamu a discreet look asking _Why are you friends with these madpersons_.

Osamu shrugged, looked him directly in the eye, and said “I literally sold my immortal soul for math tutoring. It’s either this or be sacrificed to an elder god.”

…… Oh god, Jin was genuinely the most normal person in that friend group.

Reiji fled the room screaming.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote this at 2 am lmao
> 
> Edit: I have a bunch of ideas, which of these are good and which are shit
> 
> 1\. Ranbanein the pop idol  
> 2\. Camping disaster  
> 3\. Ruka Shinoda roasts a planet  
> 4\. How Osamu sold his soul to Rinji Amatori  
> 5\. Enedorad and Replica meet  
> 6\. Yugo is Back due to dubiously predicated superscience shenanigans  
> 7\. Yuma dies, is dragged screaming out of the underworld  
> 8\. Hatohara and Rinji and the Holy Grail  
> 9\. Ra Ra Ranbanein, lover of the Afto Queen


	3. Only Mostly Dead (part 1)

_Seriously,_ Chika thought, _this is so boring._ Literally the only exciting thing to happen on this away mission was the cabbages, and look at where that had got them. And the cabbages were an _accident._

Wait! There was an Idea!

She turned to Osamu.

“Hey, do you still have that book you used to carry everywhere?”

“Which one? I had several.”

“The big one that’s bound in human skin!”

“….Yes, why?”

“I wanna bring Kuga back to life as a lich.”

As an answer, he pulled out a large volume that was indeed bound in skin.

* * *

They snuck out that night. 

"Ok, let's go over the checklist one more time." Said the larger of the two coated figures, fidgeting with his gloves. 

"Two coats?" replied the shorter one, sighing, eyes glinting violet in the dusk like a character in a terrible fanfiction written at two am.

"Check."

"White rose, blanket, quarter?"

"Check."

"Food, water, um, important object?"

"Check, and I got his ring."

"I thought that disintigrated with the body?"

"I took it off the corpse. Replica told me to, said it wasn't meant to be anyone's weapon but Yuma's and Border would make it one.

....I didn't disagree, to be honest."

"Huh. Replica really dosen't trust Kido, does he."

"No, he does not. Is it too dark to see yet?"

It was much, much too dark to see. This was a good thing.


	4. Big Fun

Hyuse had just about had enough of this weird castle shit. Sure, it was mildly amusing that Chika’s older brother had managed to get his hands on Lady Bathory’s old stronghold. And the odd occurences in the middle of the night provided novelty to the experience of once again sleeping in an oversized bed in a drafty castle in Aulberty, AKA the coldest, windiest month in recent memory. Still, enough was enough. He was pretty sure that last night’s batch of ominous noises had been some sort of eldritch summoning ritual, and he was not having that shit, thank you, Mikumo and both Amatories were bad enough to deal with already without them having some non-Eucilidian monstrosity in their corner. Kuga was ok, because Kuga was the sort of person who’d befriend a monster and then engage in friendly rivalry with it and share food and be a really good listener when you needed someone to vent to, and not make fun of you for being scared of the toaster and be generally wonderful, but the rest of them would be eaten. The rest of them being eaten would probably upset Kuga, and also get Border mad at both of them seeing as the Tamakoma people were unreasonably attached to Chika and Osamu.

Remembering the general personality of Rinji Amatori, he decided to head for the lab first. Unlike most decisions undertaken with that man in mind, this turned out to be a sound one. The lab was open, which seemed promising, a word which in this case means that nothing was currently exploding. Unfortunately, the world just seemed out to get Hyuse today, because what was inside was not full of promise for unmauled teammates and sane science practices. Instead, there was a fucking guillotine in the middle of the floor.

“Why is there a guillotine on the floor?” Hyuse asked, in a tone that added _You are all maniacs with no regard for personal safety and safe lab practices._

All of the people in the room looked at each other. More specifically, Osamu and Rinji looked down. Kuga and Chika looked up. This created some sort of uncomfortable stare pentagram. Then all of them looked at Osamu in silent consensus.

Hyuse almost felt pity for him being thrown under the bus like that.

Almost.

“…We’re chopping off my arm.” Osamu said in the resigned tone of someone who’s had to explain weird shit too many times.

“Why?”

“So that we can grow it back with some weird potion, apparently? I was kind of focused on the whole cutting-off-my-arm thing.”

Hyuse paused to consider his options. On the one hand, this was utterly against literally all the lab guidelines he had had drilled into him when he got his horns put in and subsequently spent two months under observation in a military black site. On the other hand, getting cyborg implants at age eight was not particularly safe. Instead he said:

“Why is there a pentagram on the floor?”

Like he didn’t already have suspicions.

Osamu shrugged. Then he put his arm in the guillotine.

Then Chika _fucking chopped his goddamn arm off._

Hyuse screamed. Chika and Osamu went pale. Yuma looked like a OoO emoticon, which was the closest Yuma ever got to having surprise show on his face.

Then the floor started glowing.

Everyone stopped and stared. The creature that glared back at them from the rift also stopped and stared. It sheepishly adjusted a pane of light towards the top of its extant form and coughed. Then, in a voice that was definately copied from God, but not like Christan God, like the god on _The Simpsons_ , it boomed,

“Sorry. Wrong stop.”

Then it sort of folded itself up and disappeared.

They all stood there gaping for a second. Then, Chika flopped herself onto the floor, Rinji superglued Osamu’s arm back on, And Yuma and Hyuse found a bottle of paint remover and poured it on the pentagram. Fuck the unknown, Hyuse is going to live to age seventeen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Osamu was fine, traumatic dismemberment is only a biggie if your BFFs aren't Sparks)


	5. what's a place like me doing in a girl like this

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> what the fuck is going on at ikea? I don't know and Hyuse does not either.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note i was completely sober writing this.

Hyuse was honestly kind of astonished.

The store -apparently it was called an IKEA- was full of a quantity of furniture that would have taken decades to produce back home, for no other reason than the ridiculous amount of supplies and craftspeople needed to produce this much stuff.

It was also crappy furniture.

Hyuse now knew this well. Hyuse did not know this well when he dumped Raijinmaru on the POANG chair.

The POANG chair exploded into a million tiny pieces and dissociated into splinters.

Why did this shit happen to every piece of furniture he owned? First, he accidentally set the couch on fire (by yeeting the toaster when it burned his finger), then Kuga and several “No Stove Cooking” TikToks made short work of his chair, Mikumo’s bed, and several curtains, and then he broke the dinner table trying to breakdance (long story)…….

This shit was why Hyuse had temporarily been left unattended in the chair section, because he was too much of a liability for whatever the other three had been planning with the big book they brought (that they _said_ was an IKEA catalogue, but it was bound in some sort of _skin_ and while he may have been born on Aftokrator, it sure as hell didn’t happen yesterday) and so he was abandoned again by a second set of comrades in an IKEA. And he figured the capybara would like the chair anyways.

The capybara did not like the chair. The capybara bolted. Hyuse ran after the capybara.

* * *

IKEA trial beds are widely known to be ridiculously comfortable. The floor under the IKEA bed was much less comfortable, but when you were trying to hide from IKEA security because apparently you are not supposed to run after a capybara shouting bloody murder in the middle of a department store, you took what you could get.

From above, he heard the sounds of a man shouting about something, then squelching sounds, the zappy noises, and the weird blood soaking into his face from outside the bed, and finally silence. It felt like there was a battle happening above, but this was a department store. Hopefully people at least did not treat the place where one bought furniture as an arena. He decided this was a good time for a nap.

It was in fact a bad time for a nap.

At this point he was cruelly dragged from his dusty haven by Security, which as a whole was surprisingly unreceptive to bribery, threats of violence, and him doing that floppy boneless thing that cats do when they don’t want to be picked up.

Konami had lied to him about ways to not be picked up by girls. The woman holding him certainly refused to let him go.

* * *

IKEA Jail was just like regular jail, but it came in a convenient flatpack box and you had to assemble it yourself. The guards could do this in record time, however, so it was not an issue, despite the floor being covered in pink goo and other fluids. Hyuse decided not to think about the other fluid, because they looked suspiciously like blood, but green. It was like someone had taken the way a scab looks, made it a liquid, and inverted the colour. The overall effect was that the floor was really into vaporwave. The floor started playing an electropop song. Somewhere on the horizon, Hyuse saw a corpse of a squid the size of a house. He did not know how that had fit in IKEA. He did not ask.

IKEA Jail was inhabited by the other three members of the chaotic nonsense that was the Tamakoma Kiddie Table Team. They were all covered in weird scab fluid and glowing. Kuga had no shirt on and was covered in runes. Osamu and Chika were wearing robes and chanting. Between the three of them was an egg with a squid larva in it.

Hyuse did not want to know. Hyuse wanted to go home, where giant squid at least had the decency to be escaped lab experiments and people only glowed under certain scientific conditions.

Unfortunately, Mikumo had noticed him.

“Hello”, said Mikumo, “Would you like to be initiated formally into Tamakoma 2?”

Mikumo appeared to have grown more teeth than was humanly necessary or possible in the twenty minutes or so that they had been apart. They looked very sharp.

It seemed like a bad idea to disagree at this point.

Osamu handed him the book and told him what bit to read.

Nothing happened.

Then something happened.

Hyuse could no longer see outside the IKEA Jail cell bars. The squid larva squirmed and burst out of the egg and started crawling towards him-

Mikumo unhinged his jaw and swallowed it whole. Chika gave an encouraging smile and handed him a glass of water.

Kuga opened the book. Kuga read a passage from the book, and his eyes opened up and his head was stars and-

And-

And-

It was not the sort of thing one could describe, but suddenly Hyuse had the impression of being stuck in a room with a few things, none of which were human.

But then the feeling passed and then they were standing in the middle of IKEA, and no one was shirtless or covered in blood, and then they bought a chair. They actually did spend half an hour arguing about which chair to buy, before settling in one with yellow polka dots and bows. It had a bedskirt attached to the bottom. Hyuse loved it, and then pretended he hated it because the universe would implode if he ever admitted to having a positive emotion.

They walked by the giant squid corpse on the way out. It had a large gash in one side and seemed to be mostly exsanguinated. Hyuse pretended not to notice. Meeden stores probably all had weird corpses in them! If he pretended hard enough it was normal!

Oh look, a room big enough to fit a squid, with a little tunnel to walk through. And a hole in the wall above the tank. And apparently the checkout counter. Good.

And just when he thought the ordeal was over and he could go faceplant in his bed, they were out of IKEA ice cream. This lead to Chika standing on a table demanding icey treats, and Hyuse idly wondered if no one else noticed just how _long_ her canine teeth were, and then Security came by again-

And then they got kicked out of IKEA.

Literally.

As they all lay on the ground, Hyuse said: “Did we lose Raijinmaru?”

All of them looked at each other and screamed, but they were banned from IKEA and it was too late.

* * *

Later questions were asked and answered about what the fuck had actually happened in IKEA. The half of the answers explained a great deal about what the hell was going on. The other half were nonsense about a mummy or something.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> YEAH DUDES I DO NOT KNOW HOW AN IKEA TRIP TURNED INTO COSMIC HORROR BULLSHIT EITHER


	6. young man, young man, there's no need to feel down! I said young man, young man, pick his dust off the ground!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I found this in my drafts so I edited it and Y E E T E D it into the void

When the new transfer is introduced, it’s like that bit of a romance anime where the two main characters meet and lock eyes all of a sudden, and then the future seeming to bloom with possibility (not that he can see the future, despite his best efforts), and it’s cheesy and all. Osamu swears up and down after the fact that he saw a flower CG. He stands up to the bullies in the back of the room, because he’s a romance anime protagonist now. This is his life.

Then the first paper ball hits like a missile, and Osamu is forced to acknowledge that in terms of outdated romance anime gender roles, he is not the dashing hero. He is the clumsy heroine. Great. This, Osamu thinks, is quite typical. Go to all this trouble and then you always end up as the clumsy heroine. It’s not like he falsified an appalling amount of legal paperwork on the down-low for _legitimate reasons_ or anything. Who knows, maybe Yuma has super strength as well! That’d explain the hydraulically powered paper missiles coming from his blood, saying leave him alone. A seven-nation army could not hold Yuma Kuga back.

This notion is later reinforced after school, when Yuma gets himself called out by the same group that he humiliated in class. This in and of itself is not extraordinary, considering that these people have literally bullied him for his taste in flower arrangements (It was a field trip. Very educational. He learned how to say “Fuck” in flower language) . What is in fact unusual is that not only does Yuma go willingly, he even tells Osamu not to follow! That’s a lot of confidence for someone who’s four foot seven and looks like he is composed mostly of fluff. Honestly, Osamu wonders how he got so far in life acting like this. Then again, he is a romance anime protag. Stuff like this happens on a regular basis, probably. The white hair is most likely a Tragic Backstory thing.

Wait shit, they’re at the bullying spot. Osamu knew he shouldn’t disassociate and walk!

The place that the bullies take them is a deserted part of the forbidden zone, just over the barbed wire. Border’s boundary-keeping measures are rather lax, relying on people having enough survival instinct to stay away from the part of the city that’s full of violent monsters. Unfortunately, no one who lives within ten kilometers of the war zone has any sort of survival instinct. This was clearly not accounted for by Border, though, as Osamu’s seen public parks with more security then this place. All that they needed to do to get in was jump over some wire. Possibly acquire some wire cutters. Not like Osamu is speaking from life experience or anything! How ridiculous would that be! That’s not saying much, for either the safety of Mikado’s dumbass teens or the public works authorities in charge of the parks. Of course, Yuma Kuga does not seem to think that a literal warzone should have more than a couple of signs and some wire, as he comments on the convenience of putting your combat area next to a school. It apparently must make for easy transit? Which is like, what the hell, but also that is in fact true. Them’s the facts, dude.

The bullies give a fairly standard pre-beatdown speech. All “respect us” this and “know your place” that, the standard bullcrap that everyone rolls their eyes at. At least they don’t make him kneel or punch him in the nose again. That shit hurts. Yuma apparently has no such tendency to monologue.

“Can we get to the fight?” he asks. He’s cracking his knuckles. This seems like it won’t end well for anyone, least of all the bullies. Still, this all is going fairly well, until the _sky rips itself apart_.

. He’s surprised at how big it is, and how far up. How far must Rinji have jumped? Did whomever took Chika have any trouble with it? Is he next? The lizard-thing coming out of the gate seems to say yes, it’s truly alien! The silvery scales catch early evening light, turning pink and gold. Despite the fact that they’re shaped like plate armor, they flex and move in ways that no lizard he’s seen has ever done. It’s on stubby legs, and its single yellow eye is in its mouth. It’s beautiful and terrifying at the same time. He wouldn’t mind being eaten by something

huge

but not here, not now-

He sees things, sometimes, mostly as the results of subsisting on hypercaffinated coffee for days on end. Black shadows in places no shadow would naturally occur. Huge globs of dried blood on the floor of long-abandoned slaughterhouses. People with no faces around every corner. He’s not seeing things now, though, because nothing he could imagine would be like this, bright and shining rather than terrifying.

Anyways, before he can charge in like Leeroy Jenkins, something oneshots the alien worm thing- a figure in a black jumpsuit, with white hair and red eyes. It almost reminds him of the transfer student. Wait, that is the transfer student! What the hell! His new hopefully-friend is some sort of monster killer? _Oh dear lord, this is a sci-fi romance anime. Like Evangelion._

The transfer jumps down and turns off whatever weird shit he was doing with the jumpsuit. Honestly, who has a belt around their neck- and the transfer student speaks.

“You all right, Four-Eyes?”

“Oh. Yes. I’m fine. Also we should leave, Border will be here soon.” Osamu did not want to be memory-wiped today.

“Why? The neighbor is dead, right? There’s not going to be another one, you know.”

“Border mindwipes civilians when they wander into the forbidden zone, soooo….. let’s not get caught.” Osamu started hauling the transfer- Kuga, if he remembers correctly- to the edge of the zone. He puts up a surprisingly small amount of resistance. Probably he wants to avoid being mindwiped.

Yuma obviously has more of a survival instinct than Osamu does.

When they’re far enough away from the Forbidden Zone, they split up. It’s dinnertime, and both parties need to walk home anyways. The sky is just turning dark when he sets out.

He gets home when the sun has gone and night has started, they parted ways- Yuma lives on the other side of the city from Osamu. The walk home is long, but he doesn’t want to take the bus today. He gets home at like midnight. Fine. Time is a social construct anyways. Like the gender binary and pizza.

…..Sleep is not a social construct and maybe he should get some of it.

He dreams that he is a corvid. He does not know what kind of corvid, just that he is _a_ corvid. He spreads his arms and flys off the island he is on. The island is made of tires. Belatedly, he realizes that the tires were camouflage so that he could remain a corvid. As he no longer has camouflage, he is now a seagull. He finds a middle school. It is full of robots and the teachers are all that dude from The Martian. He pecks a robot until it gives him snacks. Why is he wearing a band uniform? He’s a seagull. He knows this because he’s eating fries. The seagull orchestra abducts him. _What the fuck_ , he thinks. _This is not an orchestra uniform_. They play a weird cover of “Bad Romance” until he wakes up.

He is now a human person, who has to go to school, unlike a seagull. Yay.

School is purgatory, he decides. Yuma sneaks up behind him on the walk there. He makes no noise and somehow blends into the background like a ninja. This brings up an image of Yuma Kuga in a Naruto outfit, laying waste to a field of enemies. It suits him. Somehow this reminds him of what happened yesterday. Come to think of it, he should talk to Kuga about that.

This is how the day shakes out.

When they get to school, Osamu asks to talk at lunch. He knows by now the importance of secrecy, of cloaking your intentions like a _bunraku_ puppeteer (This school does a lot of field trips) and lying smooth as a mirror (dear lord, why did he just think that.), and he sure as hell isn’t giving up his secrets to a boy he met yesterday. Because he wasn’t born yesterday. That sounded better in his head. Thank god he didn’t say it aloud.

At lunch, Osamu takes Yuma out back to the fence. They walk along the fence until they find a break in it, then slip through to the other side. Then they walk exactly six and one eighth blocks, to the diner that is very convenient to skip school at. It’s right next to the fancy cheese store that’s terrible to skip school at.Osamu had no idea that Mikado had such a large fancy cheese market. He went in once, but it was so overpoweringly cheesy that he immediately ran away and went to the library to stare at Ayn Rand’s portrait to maintain a correct level of seriousness.

The reason for it being good to skip school at is that the place is dark, with boarded-up windows and tables that were from the 1950s and hadn’t been washed since they were aquired. the food was several health code violations on a plate, and the waitstaff would rather ridicule you than serve you food. Osamu had once seen a rat the size of a dinner plate in the kitchen. Also, due to its surroundings it smelled very strongly of Roquefort cheese.

It was _great_.

They choose a table in the back and sit down. By silent mutual consensus, they both just order coffee.

“So.” Osamu opens. “You have some kind of Trigger.”

“Yes, I do.” replies Yuma, sipping his coffee. “Kind of impossible for me to not have one.” Osamu wondered what he meant by that but decided not to ask, by means of his single braincell deciding to assert itself right at that very moment.

“Does that mean that you’re in Border?” he asked instead of the really stupid and insensitive question he actually wanted to ask, gripping the coffee cup tighter and tighter. It would be probably not be good if he was. He’d get kicked out for trying to Leeroy Jenkins that Neighbor.

“No, no. I’m a neighbor.” Osamu almost chokes on his coffee.

“What do you mean, you’re a neighbor? Neighbors are giant bug things! Everyone knows that!”

“Those are just the drones. Most places can’t spare the manpower to send soldiers all the time, especially to tiny backwater countries like this, so they send unmanned drones to capture people.” Yuma says this with a befuddled expression, like he genuinely wasn’t expecting that to not be obvious. Perhaps it’s all relative, or perhaps the Neighborhood is just a very concerning place to live.

“Wait, what? You mean that there are people over there?” _It’s not full of monsters?_

“Yep” said Kuga, smashing Osamu’s worldview into tiny pieces and stomping on them like some invulnerable video game character who would be miraculously unharmed by jumping repeatedly on broken glass. There go his dreams of becoming a creature of the night, like DIO. The band, and also the JoJo villain. Mostly the band.

“……Huh.” Is all that comes out of his mouth. This is because all the other responses require the mental equivalent of retrieving a piece of paper from the burning pile of tires that now represents his mind. He’s pretty sure there is steam coming out his ears. “So why did you come over here, then?”

“My dad died.” Yuma replied with an expression that was trying very hard to be effortlessly casual and would have succeeded if he was talking about math homework, but definitely looked weird when talking about dead parents. “I came here to see if they can revive him.”

Osamu leans forward with an expression of interest. “How would they do that? As far as I know, you aren’t carting around his corpse or anything, right?”

Yuma somehow went even paler than he already was.

“….well it’s not technically a corpse….”

The boy looked like that one gif of Rick O’Connell in The Mummy (1999) after he tries to blow up the mummy guards with dynamite.

Osamu immediately asked if he needed help with necromancy, because it certainly looked like he did. It can’t be _that hard_.

Yuma just sort of grinned at him.

Three days later, they were in command of an immortal zombie army. Yugo Kuga was still MIA, but that’s mostly because they lost the Ouija board to the dragon so it’s not _too_ pressing of an issue.


	7. everyone cries at the land before time

REASONS HYUSE IS SHOWING AN EMOTION OTHER THAN DIGUST ON HIS FACE

  * He found out Yuma defeated Viza and is now wondering what other secrets Tamakoma is hiding
  * He asked what the rest of Tamakoma is hiding and Reiji almost punched him
  * Someone made him watch Yellow Submarine (1968) and now they all think he looks like Jeremy
  * People keep yelling “No, your blueness” when he asks for things
  * Torimaru told him that the capybara could talk.
  * Chika keeps making passive-aggressive human sacrifice jokes
  * He saw Mikumo’s search history on the computer
  * He asked Mikumo about his search history and got an answer that vaguely implied that Mikumo was covering his bases in case of a vampire attack
  * Chika’s parents came over and acted _off_ and no one but him noticed. Chika was also acting weird. He is assured by the boy he found buying garlic on the internet that this is normal.
  * 10\. Mikumo keeps storing garlic in his room and the smell follows everywhere the boy goes.
  * He was forced to go to the mall.
  * He met a talking cat. It was apparently mad it wasn’t allowed on the subway, and then it gave him a book by someone called the Master? The book was good tho.
  * Tamakoma-2 sleepover. spent the night among people who all seem to have been hinting at something but he does not know what.
  * Chika’s got fangs??? Or was she trying to freak him out?
  * Kuga implied that he, Hyuse, is the only living combat member of Tamakoma-2.
  * He shook a can of Coke and it exploded on him.
  * The vending machine trapped his arm.
  * He was stuck in a room with Miwa for three hours.
  * One of the house’s in Osamu’s neighborhood has a freezer full of corpses in the basement. No one sees anything weird about this.
  * Jin’s entire existance (derogatory)
  * Konami made them go to a haunted house.
  * It was actually haunted, and the ghost was an ass.
  * Torimaru told the ghost a lie.
  * The Land Before Time.
  * Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
  * HOLY HELL WHAT IS WRONG WITH CHIKA’S HOUSE
  * WHY ARE THERE NO WINDOWS IN HERE
  * Jin taught him something
  * Was squished like a bug in training between two Escudos
  * Cronin’s Neighborhood memes brought back visceral memories of a period in his life reminiscent of middle school
  * He found a photo of a blobfish
  * When he asked Mikumo why he and Chika were so blasé about the fact that her parents literally had multiple coffins in their basement which smelld strongly of blood, Mikumo’s response was “Wouldn’t you like to know, weather boy.”
  * Konami quotes “Jared, 19” at him constantly
  * Once Raijinmaru ate his notebook, which had an entire one-act play written in it
  * Kuga told him about the time limit
  * Osamu introduced him to opera
  * Osamu insinuated that Cherubino presented an obvious parallel to Puck from _Midsummer Night’s Dream_
  * He watched _Lord of The Rings_
  * Chika’s mom straight up drANK A DUDE’S BLOOD
  * OUT OF HIS NECK
  * WHAT THE FUCK
  * Osamu won’t buy him any more garlic than he currently has
  * Torimaru told him that they were in the Matrix
  * Shiori made them all help her curse a dude to have all his teeth fall out but one, and then have an eternal toothache on the remaining tooth
  * Christmas trees in general
  * Christmas presents: Mikumo got him a pen that turns into a sword and does not use Trion, Chika got him some body lotion, Kuga got him the collected works of Shakespeare.
  * The body lotion made him fly???????
  * Was forced to attend a weird party.
  * Shiori has a flying pig that she rides. Apparently.
  * Jin called him a “friend”
  * Torimaru told him that there was a snake that crawled out of the TV on special occasions and the only way to prevent it from eating you is to sacrifice a bowl of Cheerios at exactly 5:47 am every day. He did it for a week.
  * He found a whole pallet on instant ramen on sale
  * He got home
  * Rinji killed all his enemies with a doom laser
  * Rinji summoned a demon
  * His boss tried to summon a demon and instead teleported Mikumo to the middle of his summoning circle. It is unclear if the ritual actually worked.
  * Someone yelled “This bitch empty! YEET!” while throwing his master into the Mother Trigger
  * Enedora was ressuructed via black magic.
  * Got in a fistfight with Enedora.
  * Fucked up and now rules a country????
  * Diplomacy.



**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BONUS POINTS IF YOU GET ALL THE MASTER AND MARGARITA REFERENCES.


	8. disclaimer author has never read twilight

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a daytime meeting with the commanders will usually yield change, if not necessarily good change.

Hyuse has gotten on to the team- despite the lack of return on his promises.

It is slightly annoying, but then again, she shouldn’t hold a grudge- her spider-sense side effect hasn’t reacted to him for a good month, not since he was captured.

He’s not lying about that at least.

Chika sits on the chair in the conference room, with her legs dangling over the edge. Hyuse is next to her, staring at the wall like he wants to disassemble and eat it. He’s doing the thing her brother used to do: expression that gives the illusion of annoyance or amusement or whatever, when really they’re thinking about how _easy_ it would be, to tear apart everything around them and twist it to what they want. The difference here is that Hyuse couldn’t do it. Hyuse has blood and flesh and feels some sort of human emotion, no matter how consistently negative. There’s something _there_ behind his eyes, some sort of line in the sand.

Her brother doesn’t have that. No matter how much Hyuse stares at you like he wants to rip your throat out, he doesn’t have the teeth for it ( _yet,_ the prey instinct in her hindbrain whispers) (She tries to ignore it) (she’s very hungry).

_He could never do it._

Perhaps she’s spent too much time around her brother, for that aimless, angry staring at a wall (or _person_ ) to give her that impression. Perhaps it’s the fact that sitting down and being flanked like this gives her an uncomfortable feeling, like she’s a pretty vase at a china shop. On display, for everyone to see, see here, it’s got so much Trion and it’s so compact! Yours for the small, small price of admission for our dear prisoner. And that’s what they’re doing to her. They’re bargaining her off, trading the valuable part of her for their admission.

It’s a pity this is necessary, but the world won’t give you things that you haven’t earned. Yuma was living proof, Osamu was living proof. She was the exception to the rule, the danger to others because of this power of hers. She got Aoba kidnapped, and drove away her only reprive, and now it was just her and Osamu and they had no idea how to do this, and neither of them had been allowed to plan before-

She was spacing out. Shit. She comes back-

“-That’d be like a duck bringing its own onions!”

Ah. Kinuta-san. Kinuta with a divorce, Kinuta with a daughter her age, Kinuta who looked like he’d be full of salt and that unique taste in your mouth when you’re at your computer all day and it’s just slightly too warm, but you can’t get up because you have _work_ goddamit. Kinuta’s a poor choice, she can see. She’s never run a military, but she can see- anyone with that much of an exploitable weakness shouldn’t be in charge of weapons. They could steal from him easily, to be honest.

A better choice would be Shinoda. He’s young, he’d survive the blood loss, it’s hard to bring thermoses of goat blood on missions- she always forgets to buy it anyways, it’s hard to remember when you actively ignore that you need it most of the time- and most importantly he’d be easy to get alone. It wouldn’t do to eat in the common room, what with her eating habits, and Osamu will keep her in line anyways. He’s good at that, the not getting people killed thing, especially in this context. Possibly she should ask exactly why, but that seems ill-advised, and he’d probably do the thing where he yells a random Rolling Stones lyric and runs away. That’s what happens when you ask Mikumo uncomfortable questions.

Now, where was she? Ah, yes. Being used.

She will be a tool for exactly how long this lasts, and then she will fall gracefully back into lockstep with her brother and the boy who might as well be so, and they will go back to how things were. She’ll not have to deal with the horned weirdo and the seer and the way she gets stared at in the corridors by trainees when they insinuate things about how her rank equates to the state of her virtue or how she must be cheating to have that high of a Trion level. Izuho is a blessed reprieve but a limited one, and she was never planning to be around forever anywhom. Tamakoma was sure they would stay there forever, that once they had accomplished their current goal, they’d be content here- school, Border, sleep, rinse and repeat.

They didn’t know her brother.

Most likely they wouldn’t end up on Earth at all. The most likely situation was that Rinji would have some sort of plan in motion, and she would be sucked into being a pawn and Osamu would go do whatever he was told to do, and slowly they’d turn most of the Neighbor ruling class-

Hm. There was a thought.

She looks to her right. Hyuse was still sitting there, staring at Kido like he wanted to kill him and feast on the remains. He’d said he was nobility, right? In a place to talk to other nobility and get them to do things. And he was pretty objectively delicious-looking. Granted, she generally goes for girls, but it’s not like this would be about sexual preference or taste anyways.

So she lifts her head and said: “I think I’m fine with it” when they want her to be a battery, because the way this is looking the payoff will be better than the price.

She was very, very right.

Hyuse takes the explanation of exactly what he had been hanging out in a small room with fairly well, by which she means there’s a minimal amount of screaming. It’s less than Osamu did, even. He had no idea- prolonged exposure to her in close proximity has given him slightly more perception than your average human, but it only goes so far. He does not want to be stuck with a hungry vampire, and, well……

……..He got what he asked for, dude. It’s just that in this case, that involved Chika draining all the blood from his body and giving him some of her own to turn him into an undead creature of the night.

Sure, he freaked out a bit, but he calmed down when he realized that he was effectively immortal, had super strength, and could totally kill and eat everyone who’d been rude to him. This was concerning until they actually got to Aftokrator, at which point he hunted down and killed the people responsible for selling him to a noble house in the first place. He had a hard time with the cannibalism, but Osamu had somehow smuggled a thermos of goat blood onto the ship, so they were fine in that respect.

Until someone called Hyuse a goat, that is, but that’s a story for another time.

Chika was less pleased to realize that he was not nobility and was instead a slave raised in a noble house for the purpose of warfare. She was also unpleased with the many, _many_ human rights violations around her daily.

But whatever! She had a squad of immortal monsters now! And at least one of them knew jack shit about politics!

The other ones could do black magic and warfare, respectively. Whatever, work with what you got. As most neighbor nobles would learn, that motto is never a good thing to have when what you got is someone who can raise immortal skeleton armies, someone who can strategize for immortal skeleton armies, a very powerful vampire, and the Neighbor royalty Jin picked up for you along the way. Her brother showed up halfway through. They broke him out of prison and then he gave them a death ray, it was great. Osamu had an expression that said “how is this my life” the entire time.

He was then forced to make an omelet out of dragon eggs.

It was delicious.


End file.
